Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Feel the Beat’ on Netflix, Yet Another Feelgood Dance-Competition Comedy

Since we haven’t seen a new movie about a dance competition in at least 12 days now, Netflix debuts Feel the Beat, a feelgood family comedy starring Disney Channel regular and Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists topliner Sofia Carson. She plays a Broadway flameout who goes back to her teensy home town to sulk and hopefully teach a ragtag bunch of misfit young dancers how not to be Broadway flameouts. Will she succeed? Will they be the underdog squad that topples the overdogs? Will anyone over the age of nil be able to FEEL every story BEAT before it happens?

FEEL THE BEAT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Stressful day: April’s phone alarm wakes her by saying “you have an audition.” Milliseconds later, she gets an eviction notice. To underscore these developments, she says to herself, “They’re gonna kick me out” and tells the cabbie, “Make it fast, I have a major audition” — you know, just to be clear. This, after she steals the cab from a woman who is clearly her elder, which is disrespecting her elders, especially in a torrential rainstorm. Turns out the woman who is the elder she shouldn’t have disrespected is the decider who’s deciding who wins the audition. What goes around, comes around to leave teeth marks in your ass, right? And then April pleads with the woman and accidentally knocks her off the stage and the woman breaks some bones and it’s all over YouTube now, this angry, seriously injured woman calling poor April “Chorus girl!” over and over again. And then she tries to dance on the sidewalk to impress hotshot Broadway producer Welly Wong (Rex Lee) but ends up humiliated again, and comes home and is locked out of her apartment. Like I said, stressful day.

Her blue-collar father, who you know is named Frank (Enrico Colantoni) because he wears a work shirt with a name tag that says FRANK on it, calls and expedites her Broadway exile. She goes home to her podunk town of New Hope, Wisconsin, because Second Chance, Wisconsin is too on the nose, Redemption, Wisconsin is probably in another movie and Empire Strikes Back, Wisconsin is a copyright violation. So Pickuptruck Frank picks her up in his pickup and drives her down the town’s crumbling main street so she can enjoy some salt in her wounds when she’s recognized by everyone as the local girl made good. This includes her former dance teacher Barb (Donna Lynne Champlin), who doesn’t get the nonverbal cues that April would rather be picking sea urchin spines out of her pancreas than talk to her, possibly because Barb sounds like she failed an audition herself, for a bit part in Fargo.

“You know what would make you feel better? Cheese,” says Pickuptruck Frank, deploying some choice colloquial humor. So we get a closeup shot of April chowing on a brick of cheese in line at the grocery store, where she once again bumps into Barb the Incessant, who talks the “broadway star” into stopping by the old dance studio to inspire some little girls. But all April wants to do is buy her metric ton of UTZ CHEESE BALLS (TEE EMM) and go back home with her dad, Pickuptruck Frank. And then, out on the street, she bumps into her old flame, Nick (Wolfgang Novogratz), who isn’t happy she broke up with him by text. Did I mention nobody in New Hope has seen the embarrassing video? They maybe don’t have much of duh innernet dere in duh Midwest, but one look at April’s ex assures us they do have Crossfit.

Anyway, April ends up teaching Barb’s hodgepodge of girls how to dance for the Dance Dance Dance Dance competition, probably because the Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance competition doesn’t have a “teacher feature” portion judged by Welly Wong himself! (Or “Willy Wang,” as Pickuptruck Frank mispronounces, like a total racist.) This this this this could be her chance chance chance chance. Will she whip her group of stumbling goofballs into shape for the locals, the counties, the regionals, the states, the nationals, the internationals and the intergalactics, and resurrect her career? Or is she really just a lowly chorus girl?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: That one movie about the ragtag group of misfit dancers defies the odds and makes it to nationals, except it takes place at the Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance competition instead of the Dance Dance Dance Dance competition.

Performance Worth Watching: OK, so Barb ends up being by-turns annoying and sweet in a down-homey sorta Midwestern-stereotype kind of way — and Champlin ends up being the movie’s dependable, stabilizing emotional force.

Memorable Dialogue: When April’s costume-designer pal Deco (played by Brandon Kyle Goodman) arrives in New Hope wearing his full-flamboyant NYC theater-crowd leather skirt and assorted colorful regalia, Barb exclaims, “Cheese and crackers!” SHUT UP, BARB.

Sex and Skin: None, save for the inevitable scene in which April falls on top of Crossfit Ex and they get caught in a position that makes them look like they’re dry humping when they really weren’t, but probably surely absolutely wanted to be dry humping.

Our Take: Show me yet another big-city-girl-goes-back-to-her-podunk-town story, and I’ll show you something that deserves to be ridiculed. Of course Feel the Beat is slick and formulaic. Of course it’s idealist escapism with sunny moralizing. Of course it’s aimed at young audiences. But also of course, young audiences are more sophisticated than this, and deserve something better than pinheaded platitudes and broad, moronic stereotypes. I therefore reserve the right to be mean to it.

As a character, April is so repulsive in response to her hardship, it’s hard to empathize. She’s self-pitying and dismissive, and lies to the class about being cast in a new Broadway production, a chicken in this plot that never comes home to roost. During her first visit with the group of adorable little girls, she stares at her phone like a sullen poophead. She only agrees to instruct them because there’s an outside chance it’ll be a career-booster — and her teaching methods involve being impatient with and mean to children like some big-city snotrag who thinks these little brats need some discipline. Maybe she deserves to feel sorry for herself a bit, and needs some time to mentally convalesce, but we don’t get any of that, because that’s too boring and realistic for a movie like this. So let her eat all the UTZ CHEESE BALLS until she’s too bloated to dance, I say!

The movie does subtextually address the death of Main St. at the hands of corporate entities: Pickuptruck Frank laments how the local pharmacy is closing, the roof of the dance studio caves in so class has to be moved out to the ol’ barn, and RUDOLPH’S DRY TACK AND HARD ARE is clearly not taking the “W” in this situation. If only something could cheer them up, like Dance x4, which is obviously the cure for all of our societal ailments. And then the movie ends with a big, gooey wad of melted Wisconsin cheese.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Although Feel the Beat puts all the cliches in one handy spot for convenient reference.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Feel the Beat on Netflix